Integrated circuit devices, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and the like, may be used to implement a variety of functions. For instance, an FPGA device may be configured to perform various user functions based on different user designs. Generally, electronic design automation (EDA) or computer-aided design (CAD) tools are used by circuit designers or design engineers to create circuit designs (commonly referred to as user designs) on integrated circuit devices.
As an example, an EDA tool may typically include a schematic viewer tool that produces a graphical representation of a circuit design by illustrating circuit elements and the interconnections between the different circuit elements in the circuit design. Such graphical representations are commonly known as schematic diagrams. Often times, a circuit design may have many different connections going from one circuit element to another.
To enable a user or circuit designer to trace a signal path in a circuit design, each signal path (e.g., an interconnect line that connects one circuit element to another) may be represented as a single wire net (depicted by a graphical line) in a schematic design. The resulting schematic diagram may thus be cluttered with wire nets (representing all the different interconnections in the circuit design), making it difficult for the user to analyze the circuit.
Occasionally, a group of wire nets from one circuit element coupled to another circuit element (e.g., a 16-bit output from a logic block coupled to a 16-bit input of another logic block) may be represented as a single bus line in a schematic diagram. However, for circuit elements that may not be directly coupled to each other or have the same number of input/output bits, individual wire nets are typically shown.
Tracing signal connectivity in a large schematic diagram may therefore be time consuming when the schematic diagram is overcrowded with wire nets representing different interconnections between multiple circuit elements.